Half-truths and stories

Waking from a bad dream...your breathing speeds up, your heart races, you want to hide.

You're in flight or fight mode, even though you know what you “saw” wasn’t real.

As it turns out, this is a lot like how we interpret the real world.

When we experience something, we feel something.

We become consumed in physical emotion, and then moments later, we create a fiction to make sense of what we're feeling.

Which is to say that not everything we think we think we know about the events of our lives is true.

The first insight is acknowledging that our narrative isn't 100% accurate.

The second is realizing that if that's true, we might as well tell ourselves a story that leaves us (and those around us) better off.